Features
Maths and Morality
Aditya Ghosh and Sea-Yun Pius Joung explore an unlikely source for ethical guidance. In Ethics, a central problem is what Nietzsche coined as the death of God. ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. Unlike the triumphalist tone that New Atheists have framed this in, the original formulation was one of…
Is Boris Johnson’s 10-Point Climate Plan Up to Scratch?
By Evan Turner The environment is in crisis. The next few decades are crucial to mitigate catastrophic risks and next year the COP26 Climate Conference will be held in Glasgow. The world is looking to the UK to set the tone, and there is growing public and private sector support for green technologies and acknowledgment…
The Radcliffe Department of Medicine Four Year DPhil Scholars Programme
The Radcliffe Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford is a large, multi-disciplinary department, which aims to tackle some of the world’s biggest health challenges by integrating innovative basic biology with cutting edge clinical research. The department has internationally renowned programmes in a broad spectrum of sciences related to medicine, including: Cancer Biology Cardiovascular Science Cellular and Clinical…
Pulmonary embolism – a psychological killer?
Talk Summary by Barbara Walkowiak Many of us are afraid of cardiovascular disease, and very much aware that if a blood clot forms in the vessels in our brain or heart, it can be life-threatening. What we do not usually think about is what happens when such a clot appears in the blood vessels supporting…
The deep, dark secret of the algal chloroplast- Oxbridge Varsity Sci Symposium
Talk Summary by Barbara Walkowiak The basics of photosynthesis, or why getting your own food is always challenging In times of climate change and rising global population, sustainable and efficient food production is of vital importance. The secret to improving crop yields may lie in the algal chloroplast, as powerfully described by Ella Catherall in…
Anorexia nervosa and the microbiome- Oxbridge Varsity Sci Symposium
Talk Summary by Jasmine Charles On the third day of the Varsity Sci Symposium, Gayatri Tadikamalia from the University of Oxford delivered a thought-provoking presentation on anorexia nervosa and the microbiome. Throughout this clear and well- constructed slideshow, Gayatri pointed out the links between gut composition and the psychiatric illness, and tried to establish whether…
Recurrent UTIs are not associated with increasing antibiotic resistance in E. coli
Talk Summary by Leah Hurst For the second talk in the Translational Medicine series of the symposium we owe our thanks to Aaron Koh, an incoming Natural Sciences student at Cambridge. Following a research project during his holidays based at the Genome Institute of Singapore, Aaron not only shared with us his findings of a…
New Hope for HIV Treatment
Talk Summary by Sam van Druten Viruses are a prevalent topic of discussion nowadays. I thought it would be interesting to watch the Varsity Sci talks on virology to help me understand the subject better, and to help distinguish between the fake news and real facts making their way through the media. I was grateful…
Engineering enzymes to recycle CO2
Oxbridge Varsity Sci Symposium. Talk Summary by Harry Crook. Recently the world reached the one-degree centigrade rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the first step in irreparable global warming; this has led to much research into CO2 emissions reduction. Initially this involved methods such as sequestration underground or simply planting trees,…
The link between body and mind can’t keep being ignored – Oxbridge Varsity Sci Symposium
Talk summary by Barbara Walkowiak Current diagnostic criteria that guide doctors through the complexities of the human body may often feel like checklists. If a doctor can tick enough boxes for the patient, the diagnosis is straightforward. For example, a patient may experience low mood persisting for longer than two weeks, trouble sleeping, weight imbalance…